By Jack Shillito

Raking in millions of what? Well, both money and users, as it goes.

That’s right. Tim Stokely, the 39 year-old British founder and CEO of OnlyFans had a very good 2020 thank you very much. 

OnlyFans is a subscription social media site that lets fans pay to get exclusive content from their favourite creators. 

According to The Information, OnlyFans is part of a holding company, Fenix International. The company is controlled by a Chicago-based venture capital fund manager, Leo Radvinsky, who invests in and builds technology companies. Tim Stokely is also a shareholder and board member, as is his father, Guy, who’s director of an investments company.

In case it’s not been on your radar, OnlyFans launched in 2016 and is perhaps best known for its adult entertainment content. However, Stokely has emphasised that OnlyFans is for all types of creators, and he hopes to broaden into areas such as sports. The platform already has creators that produce content in many different genres, such as gaming, fashion, sports, cooking, and so on. Stokely also notes that A-list celebrities including Cardi B have recently launched OnlyFans accounts.

Stokely is, as per his LinkedIn page, ‘an accomplished British tech entrepreneur. Tim's work is rooted in influencer marketing and social communities.’

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According to The Sun (if you hit that hyperlink they’ve - perhaps unsurprisingly - taken a rather ‘Page 3’ approach to their OnlyFans article), Stokely ‘lives in a sprawling £2.4m six-bedroom mansion with a cinema and sauna in Stortford, Herts.’ 

That Stokely owns a ‘sprawling’ mansion is maybe not that surprising when you consider OnlyFans fans pay anywhere from £3.90 to £39 a month for pictures from their favourite creators - with OnlyFans taking a 20 per cent cut - and there are 65 million of those fans.

Back in May 2020, Stokely announced that his platform had earned about 200,000 new users every 24 hours and 6,000 to 8,000 new creators were joining every day.

With people having more time on their hands, it’s maybe also not that surprising that the site’s popularity has exploded during lockdown. Indeed, as of October 2020, there are now more than 1 million content creators on OnlyFans with British creators making up about 100,000 of those. According to SimilarWeb, the site gets more than 160 million visits per month.

Stokely built OnlyFans after he previously created a BDSM and fetish site called GlamWorship.com in 2011. From there, he noticed a demand for customisable content from fans, which led to him creating Customs4U.com that let fans of adult entertainers request personal videos from them. OnlyFans came into being as a secure and reliable outlet where people can subscribe to get exclusive content from adult entertainers - and now, as we know, other types of entertainers too.

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In an interview with The Information, Stokely said that “to date we’ve paid out over $2 billion to creators. I mean, it’s incredible. There are over 100 creators who have kind of hit and gone past that $1 million earnings level.”

One of those, as The Sun was keen to point out, was British glamour model Dannii Harwood who, during lockdown, became the first Briton to make £1million from the platform since joining in 2019.

Aside from the creator aspect, “we’re working on other stuff as well,” Stokely continued, “like the launch of OFTV, for example, which will serve as a complimentary media network to OnlyFans, and we’ve got some great content already being produced.

“Now people are really starting to understand the massive earning potential of OnlyFans, we’re going to start seeing creative and more charitable profiles being set up. And that’s just one example. Ultimately, why are we seeing growth in sports? It’s the same as music, food or gaming; it’s because it serves as a bolt-on to your existing social media and provides an easy way to monetise the content.”